Safe Stem Cells Produced From Adult Cells 207
hackingbear writes "Wired, citing a paper published in Science magazine, reports that Harvard scientists may have found a safer way of giving a flake of skin the biologically alchemical powers of embryonic stem cells by turning adult cells into versatile, embryonic-like cells without causing permanent damage. The technique involves 'adding cell-reprogramming genes to adenoviruses, a type of virus that infects cells without affecting their DNA.' Four-month trials on mice demonstrated that the resulting stem cells are free from unpredictable cancer-inducing mutations. This is definitely a breakthrough in stem cell research."
Additional coverage is available at Yahoo, and Science hosts the research paper, although you'll need a subscription to see more than the abstract.
Hmmmm (Score:2, Insightful)
This is obviously a variation of the word 'safe' that I wasn't previously aware of.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:4, Informative)
try not to be too scared every time the word virus is mentioned. Viruses help as well as harm. There is very good evidence that viruses (and viral originated elements retained in these hosts) have shaped the structure and content of the genomes of many creatures (humans included) in positive ways: http://genome.cshlp.org/cgi/content/full/15/8/1073 [cshlp.org]
Adenovirus are in some way more benign given the lack direct integration into the host genome.
the released paper by Konrad's group is pretty interesting, albeit more of a technical accomplishment than a new paradigm shift.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:4, Informative)
try not to be too scared every time the word virus is mentioned.
Very true, and I'd add to that many vaccines are actually live viruses. You survived those just fine.
The important difference here is that they are safer because they don't mess up your code. The viruses which integrate their genes into your genes dump it wherever, potentially in the promoter region of a cancer-supressing gene. When the virus does that, the DNA will be maintained whenever that cell reproduces.
If the virus, like the one used here, doesn't put the DNA into the genome, it can still work for a limited time, apperantly long enough to get the job done. It won't be putting it into any genes you need to prevent cancer. And after a few divisions, the cell will lose the artificial DNA. In other words, it will be as it was before.
The mechanisms the other types of viruses would cause you cancer aren't true with this type.
Re:Hmmmm (Score:4, Informative)
Yeah, it's an unpredictable cancer-inducing mutation of the original variation of "safe".
Not familiar with adenoviruses, are you? Didn't RTFA, did you? Still don't see what you did wrong, do you?
already done by the University of Wisconsin (Score:5, Informative)
Wisconsin has and licenses most of the original embryonic stem cell lines that are approved for federal funding. Of course the popular press will cling to anything done by "Harvard".
Re: you wish. (Score:3, Informative)
Your title is wrong. This was NOT already done by the UW.
Also, your content is wrong. Thomson did NOT use adult stem cells -- his lab reprogrammed adult *skin* cells.
(That fact is even in the title of your linked story!)
Thomson used retroviral infection, as did the Yamanaka lab in Japan that did similar experiments around the same time. The Harvard lab used adenoviruses, a different vector with different outcomes.
The a major difference between retrovirus and adenovirus? Retroviruses can get the target genes
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Of course the popular press will cling to anything done by "Harvard".
Yeah, duh, Harvard studies more than better ways to make cheese.
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Man, you got him there, all the research at wisconsin is aiming to make better cheese out of human embryonic stem cells.
Stem cells in teeth (Score:2, Interesting)
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Generally the reason for a root canal is that the tooth has died. So that tooth is no longer filled with live stem cells.
Re:Further Research (Score:4, Funny)
...missing an arm and leg.
Did he need to pay for gas?
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Or someone that needs a liver, or heart, or something else. Somehow, they'll find lab animals in this kind of need. But you're right, that's the next step into perfecting the 'grow a new organ' process. Hopefully they get it right soon. I look forward to being able to rely on that in the future.
Re:Further Research (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Further Research (Score:5, Funny)
"We need to find a short blond kid missing an arm and leg."
Or make one.
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We need to find a short blond kid missing an arm and leg. It's the only way we'll ever get any farther.
Not true, observe: the best way to defeat terrorism is with embryonic stem cell research.
Put that on a bumper sticker, get some people hired as priests to say that, and get a NASCAR with that message on it, and suddenly medicine will have more money for research than it can shake a stick at.
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The real fight has between the adult stem cell people and the embryonic stem cell people over how to divvy up the stem cell money. All of those "neanderthals" in the pro-life community that got slapped with the anti-stem cell label were always for adult stem cell research. They just didn't like embryonic research.
Re:Hopefully (Score:5, Insightful)
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Nobody is aborting foetuses simply to get stem cells. They're taking cells from foetuses who are *already* aborted and whose usefulness is otherwise to merely be thrown in the trash.
Your 'main question' is a complete strawman - we don't even harvest organs from executed prisoners even though that would save a lot of lives, because that question was asked and answered year ago.
Re:Hopefully (Score:4, Informative)
Nobody is aborting foetuses simply to get stem cells. They're taking cells from foetuses who are *already* aborted and whose usefulness is otherwise to merely be thrown in the trash.
Your 'main question' is a complete strawman - we don't even harvest organs from executed prisoners even though that would save a lot of lives, because that question was asked and answered year ago.
Uh, no. They are taking embryo's from fertility clinics, not abortiong clinics. You see, when a couple goes to a fertility clinic, the clinic will fertilize multiple eggs. This is because it is so expensive, may as well do several per shot. When the couple conceives, divorces or whatever, the remaining embryos are discarded. These are the embryos that are donated for science research.
The problem some have this is that the fertilized eggs are put in a culture and manipulated to divide, thus becoming an embryo and no longer a "zygote". Stem cells are extracted from this embryo, killing it in the process.
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Pedantically speaking, preventing pregnancy isn't the same thing as dealing with an unwanted pregnancy. Once you're pregnant, it too late to do any preventing.
Really, preventing unwanted pregnancies and dealing with unwanted pregnancies are two entirely different problems which mutually exclusive problem spaces.
Until people understand this distinction, the debate around abortion will always be clouded by people who think that abstinence is the solution, not realizing that it's a solution to AN ENTIRELY DIFF
Re:Hopefully (Score:5, Insightful)
>...With this new breakthrough, it could be possible to save many lives without killing a potential human life.
Yep, all those unneeded fertilized embryos now go straight to the incinerator, no stop for any life-saving harvesting in between.
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There's also another, broader question, which last I heard nobody quite agrees on, namely "Is an undifferentiated ball of cells a human being?". If the answer is "no", then it sidesteps your question entirely. It doesn't seem entirely proper to debate that question, in relation to this issue, when there's broad division on whether we even need to answer it.
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In my humble opinion, I don't know whether or not a small clump of cells should be considered human life (has to be a "small" clump of cells because humans are just a big clump of walking, talking cells in the first place).
I become concerned when people say that if we don't know if its a life or not, then we should treat it as dead to help the unambiguously alive. I would disagree with that, and I think that's what Bush meant when he said America should be a "culture of life" not a "culture of death" forev
Ball of cells vs. human being (Score:2)
There's also another, broader question, which last I heard nobody quite agrees on, namely "Is an undifferentiated ball of cells a human being?".
This is the big question. At what point between conception and the age of legal majority are we discussing a human being that should be under the protection of the law?
For example, if you were on a jury trying immigrants from Fiji for killing their 2 week old daughter ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Infanticide#Oceania [wikipedia.org] ), would you convict them for murder?
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It's not really a debate between life and death, it's "do we put its remains to good use or do we just throw them in the trash" because the cells are taken from surplus embryos during an artificial insemination which are going to die anyway (in the process lots of embryos are created because it's likely that the injection will fail to some degree and they want to make sure they get a healthy embryo to implant). Kinda like arguing that involuntary organ donations (not the Monty Python kind) kill people when
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Protip: No one wants to kill babies, they want to use embros that were going to be thrown out anyway, and that happens a lot.
http://www.motherjones.com/news/feature/2006/07/souls_on_ice.html [motherjones.com]
The more you know.
So the argument is either
A: No fertility allowed for couples in these situations. This means all those potential lives aren't given a chance.
B: Give birth to them all, which means they have to deal with 7-12 kids instead of one. Just what we need, a fam
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Re:Hopefully (Score:5, Informative)
many people believe "Human Life" doesn't begin until after the state that embryo's are harvested.
yes, but this new discovery neatly side- steps that problem.
and for those above who say that McCain will find some way to construe it as unethical, the pope has said that adult stem cell research is fine. Pope endorses adult stem-cell research (catholicnews.com) [catholicnews.com] If the pope is good with it, i don't see any elected official having a problem with it.
"The possibilities opened up by this new chapter in research are in themselves fascinating" because adult stem-cell studies have pointed to actual and potential cures of degenerative diseases that would otherwise lead to disabilities or death, the pope said at an audience for participants attending a Vatican-sponsored congress on stem-cell therapy.
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Joe Biden (candidate for the Office of the Vice President of the United States, and a Catholic, even) disagrees.
Abortion being wrong, abortion being a necessary evil to prevent more deaths, and the united states government having a right to dictate to women what they can and can't do to their own bodies are three totally separate issues. Most everyone feels that abortion is a bad thing, but anyone rational sees that there are more issues than than that which aren't so simple of "is it wrong."
Drinking yourself into oblivion every night is bad, but prohibition didn't work and was a stupid move to begin with because th
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Abortion being wrong, abortion being a necessary evil to prevent more deaths, and the united states government having a right to dictate to women what they can and can't do to their own bodies are three totally separate issues.
At the risk of turning this into a debate about abortion, two of these are at odds.
Generally speaking, I'm allowed to do what I want with my body until I start harming another human being. That means I can thrust my fist out in front of me all that I want, right up until the point that someone is standing within arms readch in front of me.
Similarly, a woman can also do whatever she wants with her body, until she starts affecting another human being. The obvious question, then, is whether or not the
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The obvious question, then, is whether or not the fetus is a human being.
More generally if it has rights that trump the mother's rights. Included in that is whether or not it's a human. The death penalty is also framed in that way.
The larger question than that though is if anyone has the authority to say if the fetus is a human being with rights. It's possible to have an opinion that the fetus does have rights, but the opinion that you, the government, and the church don't have the ability to dictate that.
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Yes, yes, the Pope is not the leader of all christians. We get that. However, in this case, the Pope is adopting the consensus pro-life position. On this issue the protestant reformation shouldn't be a problem.
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yes, but this new discovery neatly side- steps that problem.
Not really. IPS cell technology is still based off of knowledge from and studies using human embryonic stem cells. This new approach wouldn't exist without the type of research the Vatican and Republicans oppose. Anyone who thinks HES cell research is evil would be a hypocrite to accept IPS-based treatment.
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So now we've got to have a clean room, reverse engineering process before we're allowed to modify our own cells to treat disease? Do you really want to treat embryonic papers like Nazi science experiments? That's the only modern example of a science embargo like the one you're describing.
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I'm sorry, I have no idea what you're talking about. Studies on human embryonic stem cells, which some people are opposed to, were the basis for knowing how to induce pluripotency. If you're actually opposed to HES research, you should be aware of that if and when you need treatments derived from it.
I'm just saying you can be morally opposed to it and not take the treatment, you can be okay with it and accept the treatment, or you can be a hypocrite and accept the treatment even though you think it's evil
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While the Vatican is very big on the fruit-of-the-poisoned-tree stuff (what's original sin if not that?), they don't actually expect people not to use the stuff, just to feel guilty about it.
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Really! That's fantastic! That means we can lay another annoying thing to rest now doesn't it...
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It's not only the Pope but all of the pro-life religious leadership that's adopted a similar approach. I don't know of one religious faction that fights against adult stem cell research.
Sadly, it will probably not end it.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Mainly, because there are too many want-a-be-stupid's out there who constantly decry the ban on stem cell research that doesn't exist.
The only ban is on Federal funding for fetal stem cell research. Which has mainly only succeeded in growing tumors.
Meanwhile, many in the field have said that they do not believe they need fetal tissue. Most successful stem cell treatments have all been derived from the more stable adult stem cells.
But hey, keep on being stupid, it let's you further your hate of Bush and keep
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Yeah, because adding a dozen or so steps to the front end of a process involving stem cells makes things SOOOOOOOO much easier, simpler, and cheaper than using harvested embryonic stem cells.
Yes it does... (Score:3, Informative)
As the adult stem cells are more stable and less prone to grow tumors. It's like putting a 16 yr old first time driver (the researchers) in a Chevy or a NASCAR. And seeing which one they have more success driving around town.
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I think I'd rather have the steps up front with adult cells from my own body than anti-rejection medication and chemotherapy on the back end, thank you very much.
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without embryonic stem cells the process for making these induced pluripotency cells would never have been discovered.
The genes required for such reprogramming are intimately involved in the mechanisms that embryonic stem cells use to maintain their phenotype. Indeed without the extensive studies that have gone on in both human and mouse ES cells we would be completely ignorant about the roles of these genes.
A little research will make you sound a whole less ignorant.
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History lesson... (Score:3, Informative)
"You same types were the ones saying there was no way the earth is round or revolved around the sun."
They weren't telling Columbus the world was round. But that it was 2x-3x bigger than he thought and that he'd never make it.
Oh...guess what...they were right. And if there hadn't happened to be another continent smack in the middle of the ocean. Columbus would have died and not even been remembered.
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As opposed to the rest of the stuff on slashdot, and your little one liner?
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Perhaps cause they don't have a problem in 1,000 people die in their research. They'll breed more...
Heck, they even poison their baby formula, petfood and fish. Yes, safe research and China...
Hilarious!!!
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An earlier study did in fact take human fibroblasts and showed they could be reverted back to the deprogrammed state. In mice without immune systems, they behaved as human embryonic stem cells do. But you're right, we can't shut the door on HeS cells yet, it is too premature, we might find problems with IPS cells that aren't the case with HeS cells.
Re:Only on mice, for now (Score:5, Interesting)
Instead we're faced with the new controversy that every skin cell you shed can be considered an embryo that, with the correct application of medical science, can now become a child.
Scratching yourself will now mean you're killing babies!
Or, perhaps you're trying to create an evil clone army with all those cells?
There's plenty of material and interpretations for anyone who wants to find controversy.
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Is that you, Sam Harris?
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Instead we're faced with the new controversy that every skin cell you shed can be considered an embryo that, with the correct application of medical science, can now become a child.
Scratching yourself will now mean you're killing babies!
I already kill half embryos that could become human children quite often, what's wrong with killing whole ones?
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Yeah, those aren't embryos, they're swimmers.
Re:Only on mice, for now (Score:5, Funny)
Exfoliation is MURDER!!!
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It's okay - you're worth it
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The consideration isn't the "potential to become a child". It's a question of unique human lives.
An embryo is a unique human life (with a form of asexual reproduction - twinning).
Then, the question becomes, are our rights intrinsic (inherent in what we are) or extrinsic (applied by others based on our value).
My worry is that human rights are currently extrinsic...
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My worry is that human rights are currently extrinsic...
The Socialists need you to believe that to undo the United States of America as conceived in 1776/1789 - that one is based on intrinsic or natural rights.
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Intrinsic or natural rights that people believe they have
Nature doesn't seem to recognise these rights, so I highly doubt they're natural.
I think human rights are a good thing, but they are an entirely human concept, just as 'animal rights' or indeed any sort of rights are. In nature, might is right. People, plants and animals are regularly destroyed by natural disasters, or each other.
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FTFY
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Can we have a -1 ignorant mod? Natural rights are well defined and centuries old. You should have heard about them in school.
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What happens if I'M the evil clone?
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You should grow a goatee immediately.
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Scratching yourself will now mean you're killing babies!
I wasn't scratching, and mind your own damn business. :)
Only for contrarians. (Score:4, Insightful)
There's plenty of material and interpretations for anyone who wants to find controversy.
Only if you're being a sophist. The people who are upset at fetal stem cell research aren't just making up clever arguments to dump all over people's hard work and potential medical salvation -- they genuinely believe in the whole "life starts at conception" argument.
You may not agree with pro-lifers, but you're not going to convince them to change their minds or find middle ground with the ones that are on the fence about fetal stem cells with ridiculous straw man arguments. And you're never going to make a difference if you have nothing but contempt for the other side's beliefs and the honesty with which they hold them.
Really, that applies to all of politics, faith, taste, and any other subject with an emotional element that can't be reduced to a simple proof of facts.
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And you're never going to make a difference if you have nothing but contempt for the other side's beliefs and the honesty with which they hold them.
Oh, make no mistake. I have no contempt for their beliefs. What I have is contempt for their inconsistency.
Specifically: Unless you also violently disagree with in-vitro fertilization, you have absolutely no right to protest the use of fetal stem cells.
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Specifically: Unless you also violently disagree with in-vitro fertilization, you have absolutely no right to protest the use of fetal stem cells.
I assume you're referring to the fact that they typically create multiple embryos, implant some and destroy the rest. Many pro-lifers that are aware of that aspect of the process DO oppose it (E.g., I believe the whole Roman Catholic Church officially opposes it).
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Yeah, except all the theologians have already combed through this material and have already ruled in obscure little theological journals that it's not a problem. You're late to the party.
How does it feel to be on the trailing edge?
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The timers on cells cannot be reset. These are older cells. You can attempt to use them for repairs, what-not. But they will never be the same as actual stem cells.
Well then you better tell the cells that, because they seem pretty convinced. Not sure which timer you're talking about, but all the ones we can measure have been and they seem to think they're embryonic stem cells.
Telomere length is often described as a cell timer. Those are the ends of chromesomes, they shorten after every cell division in mature cells, and the thinking is that when they get short enough you don't have further divisions because it would be losing actual coding regions of DNA. But these
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There is a story of a man who was very attached to his dog, and brought the dog everywhere. One day he went into an east-asian restaurant- as he sat down he told the waiter to take care of his dog. The waiter asked if he wanted the special, and the man agreed. A while later, the man received and ate a dish he enjoyed more than anything he had ever eaten, and after he was finished, he asked the waiter about his dog. The waiter was confused, as the dog was the special the man just ate.
I
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Not necessarily to contradict your point, but your analogy does not paint the picture that I interpreted from your second paragraph. Consider this;
I certainly would not want harm to befall my daughter, but like me, she still chose to be an organ donor. If the worst should happen, our loss might still bring a benefit to others. The pain aside, if she was killed in a say, a car accident, I would be fine allowing her organs to be taken to save someone else. As I'm sure the recipient might feel empathy for our
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Interesting)
As someone who considers "humane killing" an oxymoron of the first degree, I'm fine with the idea. The person being killed probably doesn't care much whether he's injected with a lethal poison or shot in the head. The person needing a transplant, on the other hand, cares very much about living a normal life.
Similarly, the embryos are already being created and destroyed en masse by fertility clinics. (And yet, for some reason, pro-lifers never complain about that.) Does the embryo care whether it's grown into organ tissue or thrown in the trash? Does a person suffering from a degenerative disease care about a cure?
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Don't you see how this practice encourages the killing to be done in the first place?
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Don't you see how this practice encourages the killing to be done in the first place?
It only encourages it if the person authorizing it has something to gain. If your legislators and judges are reaping profits from convictions, your legal system is broken.
To prevent a conflict of interest in stem cell research, require that the fertility clinic not be paid for the embryos, or be reimbursed for the extra handling involved only, and forbid stem cell research companies from operating their own fertility clinics. In other words, if you make the commercial production of embryos unprofitable, t
Re:Doesn't matter (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not too far unlike the the reason why labor laws generally do not allow you to opt-out (minimum wage, lunch, etc). While it is understandable that workers may want to on their own accord, it becomes extremely difficult to prove that they weren't encouraged to by their employer.
Similarly, if we're allowed to harvest organ from people we killed on purpose, how can we be sure that the person was killed for legitimate reasons? So we look to legislation to minimize any positive side effects to a person's death.
And likewise, while embryos might not count as human life, they are human. By allowing people to harvest stem cells from them, you are putting utility in destroying human could-be-life. The end result is not awfully far from _farming_ human could-be-life since, as above, proving things like 'abandoned' is difficult. This doesn't sit well with a lot of people, and especially so with those that view embryos are full fledged human life.
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Embryos count neither as human life or human beings. They are clumps of undifferentiated stem cells. You don't need to farm them. You can grow one line into a massive number of cells with very little effort. The greater problem is that they are genetically different from you and could be recognized by your body as a foreign invader.
One of the promises of iPC is that if we grow an organ with it, it's a real cure rather than 5-10year stopgap like most of our organ transplants tend to be.
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Similarly, the embryos are already being created and destroyed en masse by fertility clinics. (And yet, for some reason, pro-lifers never complain about that.)
That's ignorance, not hypocrisy. The average pro-lifer is simply not aware that these embryos are being destroyed.
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Not abortion. Fertility clinics. Create zygotes/fetuses for "convenience" because it's so expensive to do IVF, then they throw away the extras. Why is that OK with Evangelicals?
That's the question that was being asked.
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> What do you think of the Chinese practice of executing prisoners with a bullet to the head, so that no vital organs are damaged, allowing them to be transplanted to faithful Party hacks, or people willing to pony up the money for them? Would you be cool with the US government doing the same thing? After all, the guy's going to be killed anyway; It's RECYCLING!!!111eleventy
I don't live in the US so I really don't care either way, but if a criminal who has been sentenced to death is willing to donate his
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Then keep the medical records private/sealed under after sentencing.
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I don't support it, but if ones country insists on using it (mine doesn't) one might as well harvest organs.
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> infanticide will be our greatest downfall
Elaborate.
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Two words: "Social Security."
It doesn't matter how much money is in the "trust fund" If there aren't enough people to pay to do the work, anyway.
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No, not necessarily. Aborted foetuses, and stem cells from umbilical cords, could easily be harvested and cultured. Cultured stem cells work just fine for implant tests, so far. There is _no_ need to harvest living for the stem cell work, even if the transplants are of physically significant volumes of cells. Cultures of such morally harvested single stem cell lines can easily serve hundreds if not millions of recipients.
Your ignorance of the biology is exactly why stem cell funding is so difficult to obtai
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Adult stem cells are natural and generally give rise to only one or a few cell types. They aren't pluripotent. Your adult stem cells which give rise to your new red blood cells probably only give rise to blood cells, not neurons.
The cells talked about above and in the article aren't adult stem cells, they're reprogrammed adult cells. Like skin cells that have been manipulated. I've seen them called INDUCED pluripotent stem cells.
So adult stem cells aren't pluripotent but are naturally occuring. IPS cel
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I think I misunderstood who was confused there. It does appear that IPS cells can be used the same as HES cells, except that since your own cells can be induced, there's no chance of tissue rejection, you're quite right. IPS cells can make all the cells that HES cells can (and of course, adult stem cells cannot).
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I don't know, if the IPS cells truly are behaving as HES cells, then you could probably use the same culturing techniques used with HES cells to maintain it. So you could use them as their own line after one conversion the same as you can with HES cells.
At least, I think HES cell lines can be maintained to where you can use them continuously without them differentiating, rather than harvest new embryos every time, I could be off.
One benefit I could see with using HES lines instead of IPS lines is that the
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We need to be making more noise about the fact that these advances only came about via embryonic stem cell research. The genes they expressed weren't random, they started from genes they knew were expressed in embryonic stem cells.
If there is a cure for any condition that comes out of IPS cell treatment, that's benefiting from embryonic stem cell research. If you believe stem cell research is evil, you have to at the very least turn down any treatment from multi-purpose cells like this, say you were wrong
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The "fruit of the poison tree" approach only goes so far. Should we discard research done on injured or killed soldiers because that would be benefiting from the evil of war?
Re:As someone with a spinal injury..... (Score:4, Informative)
My main question is when the hell is this actually going to help someone?
Well, if we had something that works, we'd be selling it. Many treatments that seem really promising in early stages, when it's just yeast, rats, or pigs, seem very effective, but then make the jump to humans and it suddenly doesn't work. The other common occourance is that something works great in mice, but a little too great.
In the case of mice trials of IPS cells, the injected cells did indeed make many types of cells including neurons. Of course, it was completely random and produced awful tumors which would be resistant to cancer treatments. When injected in the abdomen for instance, many mice developed large bony tumors which eventually would have killed them.
IPS cell treatment could maybe do some help but would go way overboard. Neurons wouldn't just grow in your spinal cord, there would also probably be bone cells, fat cells, skin cells, and a lot of not completely mature cells which would crawl all throughout your central nervous system before turning into whatever they felt like. Some cells may turn into neurons at the right places and make the right connections, but most would not, and there's no way yet to screen out those others.
I believe the chinese have injected human embryonic stem cells, functionally the same thing as the stem cells discussed here, into humans. The results were not pretty, the victims died within months of teratomas.
As far as the rate, it is painfully slow for an individual watching the process. This is true for all levels of research though, it's never fast enough for the researchers (and it's frustrating for us, believe me) and it's not fast enough for patients. Not the answer that you're hoping for, but we are trying our very best. To be honest, the field is progressing extremely rapidly compared to other fields of biomedical results. Everyone involved knows the huge benefits this research would gain, and there's a ton of funding compared to other areas. It's been about a year since the original breakthrough, in that time they've apperantly managed to overcome one obstacle to treatment, a feat which would take much longer normally. The researchers in labs working about this probably average at least 60 hours a week working on it, one of the lead investigators took a yearlong sabattical from teaching entirely to work on this, and I've heard several researchers, having published the papers last year have said they're going to get out of this research or research entirely, they're too burned out.
We also aren't letting the talking heads get in our way. The current induced pluripotent stem cell field came out of human embryonic stem cell research. While the moral nannies were saying it was an outrage, those scientists came up with this.
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Well, that depends on the research and the application. In the case of spinal cord repair, no. Adult stem cells are thought to only make one or a few types of cells, not because the genetic information is lost but because the DNA has been modified to silence it. In every cell you have the same DNA, your skin cells have the genes to make neurons and your hair color, but in addition to not being read and used by your skin cells, it's physically unreadable. DNA methylation appears to be used to silence gen
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AFAIK, umbilical cord blood is also a source of pluripotent stem cells.
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On the other hand, even looking at a lab mouse funny causes it to develop cancer. If after 4 months these mice haven't developed tumors, they may have just found the cure for cancer!
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Then, of course, the stem cells caused their head to grow back...